Yep, it was an organisational issue with different work types.

To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."

If they had become vile then someone would have been fired. CTO did a good job and stepped in before that happened.

That's subtly different to what you said before. Godwin's Law wasn't why you had to lock down code reviews. It was in anticipation of the law being true that you did it, which isn't quite the same thing. Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps.

Godwin's Law was part of the CTO's reasoning to split up the team and lock down code reviews to within each specific team.

So it forms part of the why.

Maybe they were just writing a lot of `AbstractHitlerBeanFactoryBuilder` classes.

On a more serious note, there is an argument for all computing being fundamentally authoritarian. You have one root account dictating how other users can consume resources, and from that you descend onto things like "the project owner". If this model is not tempered downstream, I can see how people can end up shouting "nazi" at each other.

(still, I guess one should probably catch himself before violating Godwin's Law in a work environment...)

RMS was anti-root (or anti-"wheel", I can't remember) for basically this reason.

There certainly is a lot to be analyzed in the power relations of control of the means of production and distribution of information, from the society wide scale to the individual device, but technologists are remarkably bad at doing this.

But also why conflate the arrangement of performance sensitive digital procedures and the social structure behind several billion people living on the same planet?

You should optimize for very different metrics.

Because it incentivises a specific mindset, which then cascades into everyday situations. Computers do what they are told (by root), other humans don’t do that - it can be a source of friction and frustration. A frightening amount of radicalised terrorists eventually turn out to be IT people... IMHO we don’t yet appreciate the influence that the tools we live and breathe have on ourselves.